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LaChance Interviewed by ‘Le Devoir’ on Trump’s Embrace of Death Penalty

Dr. Daniel LaChance, Associate Professor and Winship Distinguished Research Professor in History, 2020-23, gave an interview to the Quebec newspaper Le Devoir on the Trump administration’s last-minute push to carry out executions in its final months. LaChance is a legal scholar working at the intersection of American legal and cultural history, criminology, and literary studies. His first book is Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Read an excerpt below along with the full article.

“The Trump administration enthusiastically embraced the death penalty, summarizes Historian Daniel LaChance, who teaches at Emory University Atlanta, Georgia, in an interview with Le Devoir. ‘In this respect, you can even say that Donald Trump is the deadliest president since the nineteenth century. His provocative support for the death penalty was a key part of his Make America Great Again platform.’ And obviously, he intends to take his project to the end.”

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Price Quoted in ‘The Atlantic’ Article on Quarantine Practices and Pressures

Dr. Polly J. Price, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Professor of Global Health, and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in an article in The Atlantic titled “The Real Reason Americans Aren’t Quarantining.” The piece examines how many residents of the U.S. are not able to quarantine in the midst of COVID-19 because of economic and labor pressures. Read an excerpt from the piece below along with the full article.

Conflicts over remote work and leave are the most common type of COVID-19 employment litigation in the U.S., according to a database compiled by the law firm Fisher Phillips. “We don’t really pay people to stay at home to quarantine,” Polly Price, a global-health professor at Emory University, says. But that’s exactly the problem: In a study in Israel, people were more likely to quarantine after exposure to COVID-19 if they were paid during their isolation.

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Suddler Participates in Schomburg Center’s Conversations in Black Freedom Studies Series

Dr. Carl Suddler, Assistant Professor of History, recently participated in conversation hosted by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Titled “Resisting Carceral Cities: Prisons, Police & Punishment in Perspective,” the event centered on the rise of prisons and police and resistance to them in historical perspective. Suddler was joined by Garrett Felber (The University of Mississippi), author of Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement and the Carceral State (UNC Press, 2020), and Kelly Lytle Hernandez (UCLA), author of City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (UNC Press, 2017). Suddler is the author of Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (New York University Press, 2019). Read more about the event here.

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Anderson Quoted in ‘WaPo’ Article on Black Voters’ Responses to Trump’s Baseless Fraud Claims

Dr. Carol Anderson was recently quoted in a Washington Post article titled “Anger builds in Black community over Trump’s claims of voter fraud in big cities.” The piece analyzes how Black voters have responded to Donald Trump’s accusations of voter fraud in cities with high populations of Black residents, such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, and Milwaukee. Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read an excerpt from the article quoting Anderson below along with the full piece.

“It’s as vile now as it was during Reconstruction, when Democrats believed that Republicans were illegitimate and that Black voters had no right to be voting, and they did all of these terrorist activities to block African Americans from voting,” said Carol Anderson, professor of African American studies at Emory University. “It’s a very narrow, slippery slope, from saying ‘illegal votes’ to ‘illegal voters,’ so this attack on Black voters is real.”

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Lipstadt Condemns Yad Vashem Nomination in ‘The New York Times’

Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and associated faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in an article in The New York Times titled “Israel’s Pick to Head Holocaust Memorial Stirs International Uproar.” In the piece, Lipstadt condemns the nomination of Effie Eitam, a retired general and far-right politician, to head Irael’s official Holocaust memorial, the Yad Vashem. Read an excerpt of the piece below along with the full article.

“This is more than a colossal mistake — it’s a tragedy,” said Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta who has written several books on the subject. “Appointing Eitam to this position would be a blot on Yad Vashem’s reputation and Yad Vashem’s record.”

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Debjani Bhattacharyya (PhD, ’14) Publishes “Almanac of A Tide Country” for SSRC’s ‘Items’

Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya, Associate Professor of History at Drexel University and a 2014 graduate of the PhD program, recently published an article in the Social Science Research Council’s digital publication Items. Published as a part of Items‘s “Ways of Water” series, the piece analyzes visual and historical representations of the tides of the Hooghly River in Kolkata. Bhattacharyya’s Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018) won the 2019 honorable mention award for the best book in urban history from the Urban History Association. Read the Items piece here: “Almanac of A Tide Country.”

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Yannakakis and Premo Win American Society for Legal History Article Prize

Congratulations to Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, 2018-2021 Winship Distinguished Research Professorship in History and Associate Professor, on winning an article prize with co-author Dr. Bianca Premo (Florida International University). The American Society for Legal History awarded their 2019 American Historical Review article, “A Court of Stick and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond,” with the Jane Burbank Article Prize. The prize is awarded annually to the best article in regional, global, imperial, comparative, or transnational legal history.

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Working Apart, Making History Together

Just like our colleagues from across the globe, the Emory History Department has faced unprecedented challenges in the age of COVID-19. Though working apart for much of this year, our faculty, students, and staff have shown remarkable adaptability and spirit. They have continued to produce and share innovative, publicly-engaged histories in virtual classrooms and beyond, all the while supporting each other in extraordinary times. As we near the end of the fall 2020 term, we invite you to take a look back at a few stories of resilience relating directly to COVID-19:

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Anderson Quoted in ‘U.S. News and World Report’ Article: “Stacey Abrams’ Legacy: A Democratic South?”

The 2020 election saw a majority of Georgians vote for a democrat for president for the first time since 1992. Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, analyzed the years of grassroots organizing and coalition building that led toward this shift in a recent U.S. News & World Report article. Anderson discusses Stacey Abrams’ role in turning Georgia blue along with the prospect that other states in the U.S. South may see similar shifts in future elections. Read an excerpt below along with the full piece: “Stacey Abrams’ Legacy: A Democratic South?“

“What we have here in Georgia is incredible grassroots mobilization and organizing,” says Anderson, chair of Emory’s African American studies department and author of “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy.” Abrams may have had a high profile, Anderson says, but an army of behind-the-scenes workers were just as invaluable, and the coalition they built included advocacy groups for Asian Americans and Latinos.

“They’ve been doing the work for years, and I mean years,” Anderson says. “Not just two years or three years. I mean, years,” including a decade for Abrams, who started when she was in the Georgia General Assembly – “and it is long, hard work. That is not glamorous. It takes long, hard, sustained effort.”

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Lipstadt Joins ADL in Condemning Yad Vashem Post

Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in an article in The Atlanta Jewish Times. The piece discusses Lipstadt’s opposition to the controversial nomination of former far-right politician and military commander Effi Eitam to head Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Shoah or Holocaust. Read the excerpt below along with the full article: “ADL and Lipstadt Condemn Yad Vashem Post.”

“Yad Vashem is one of the jewels in the crown of Israeli institutions,” said Deborah Lipstadt, Emory University Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies. She said that, given Eitam’s “fringe views, views that separate and divide rather than unite,” his nomination is a “colossal mistake.” She told the AJT that she plans to voice her opposition to the controversial nomination.